Paul Lee
Senior Product Manager
Google.org
Users in Mobile Data
About a year ago IT started tracking. Africa constantly has had the highest mobile internet cost of any region in the world.
People seem to be confuse who use “ Pay as you go” verses bundles. Are very confuse of how much value they actually getting for it. It turns out that even pay as you go is typically twice to three times the expenses than data bundles. Did you know that a web page on the net is 500k? Researcher have shown that Africa users top-up they accounts daily.
Non- Users and Users are different of what they care about. They facing different issues. Important factors for users are speed, uncertainty of cost, cost is cost to them and what they the actual service cost is. Cost is very complex in terms of services cost, uncertainty of cost and device cost. It turns out for non-users the biggest issue by far is device cost that they facing today.
App developers must think of new versions for existing users using their site in order to keep existing users of the mobile internet attracted and loyal to they site and pages. Advertising the app and letting users know the low cost of using these Apps will keep users loyal to they product they render. Most successful Apps in Africa in the last 5years is Whatsapp and mxit cause its easy to maintain.

I’m a frequent user using apps like Mxit, Whatsapp and Facebook etc. When mxit first started it was much cheaper than it is today and the number of app users have grown over the years. Yes they do improve the apps and features but it takes up more airtime and data bundles. Is it cause some companies want to make more profit on the apps or cause of expenses to upgrade the apps for users? All comments welcome.